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STEM CELLS REPLACE SKULL

(AP) -- Surgeons have used stem cells from fat to help repair skull damage in a 7-year-old girl in Germany, in what's apparently the first time such fat-derived cells have been exploited to grow bone in a human.

The girl had been injured two years before in a fall, which destroyed several areas of her skull totaling nearly 19 square inches, the German researchers reported.

Other surgeons had failed to correct the defects, and the girl wore a protective helmet. Her brain could sometimes be seen pulsating through the missing areas of her skull.

But several weeks after the stem-cell surgery, she was able to leave her helmet behind, the researchers report in the December issue of the Journal of Cranio-Maxillofacial Surgery. The skull is now smooth to the touch, the missing parts replaced by thin but solid bone, said Dr. Hans-Peter Howaldt of the Justus-Liebig-University Medical School in Giessen, Germany. The child was not identified.

Howaldt, who performed the surgery last year, said the damage was too extensive to be repaired with bone grafts from her body. He said the hope was that if bits of the child's bone were mixed with stem cells, the cells would turn into bone-building cells that would create additional bone.

That appears to have happened, Howaldt said in a telephone interview Thursday.

"I cannot prove that our success comes from the stem cells alone," he said, "but the combination of the two things simply worked."

In August, other German doctors reported growing a jaw bone in a man's back muscle and transplanting it to his mouth to fill a gap left by cancer surgery. The researchers used bone marrow, which also contains stem cells, to help grow the bone. But it's not clear whether the stem cells were responsible for the bone growth.

So Roy C. Ogle of the University of Virginia, an expert in skull reconstructive surgery who has been studying bone regeneration from fat-derived cells, said he considered the new report to be the first indicating that any kind of stem cell had been used to grow bone in a human.

"It is a very big deal," said Ogle, who called the study a landmark.

He agreed that the study didn't prove that stem cells provided the new bone. But it also indicates that the implanted cells did no harm, which has been a concern with using stem cells in people, he said.

Ogle said many surgeons would have augmented the child's bone with a mineral paste or collagen instead of stem cells. Howaldt said he believes it's better to use the body's own tissue.

Howaldt and his colleagues treated the skull in the same operation that recovered bone from the girl's pelvis and about 1.5 ounces of fat tissue from her buttocks. The bone was milled into chips about one-tenth of an inch long and placed in the missing areas of the skull. Then surgeons added the stem cells to the bone chips. The cells had been extracted from the girl's fat in a laboratory while surgeons prepared the girl's skull.

Howaldt said the bone chips appeared to instruct the stem cells to make more bone. While the new bone should grow as the child grows, she's old enough that her skull won't grow much more anyway, he said.

It's a good thing we're so Godly here in the U.S., wouldn't want to give a little girl back her skull. God Bless...California

SEOUL -- South Korean researchers say they've used stem cell therapy to enable a paralyzed patient to walk after she was not even able to stand for the last 19 years.

Chosun University professor Song Chang-hun, Seoul National University professor Kang Kyung-sun, and Han Hoon from the Seoul Cord Blood Bank said they transplanted multi-potent stem cells from umbilical cord blood into the 37-year-old female patient who suffered from a spinal cord injury, the Korea Times reported Saturday.

The woman could now walk unassisted, the scientists said.

"The stem cell transplantation was performed on Oct. 12 this year and in just three weeks she started to walk with the help of a walker," Song told reporters at a news conference in Seoul.

The woman's legs were paralyzed after an accident in 1985 that damaged her back and hips and confined her to a wheelchair.

The researchers said they isolated stem cells from umbilical cord blood and then injected them into the damaged part of the woman's spinal cord.

Us 'Godly' Americans wouldn't want paralyzed people walking again either, imagine what kind of effects it would have on the wheelchair business!

FRIDAY, Dec. 17 (HealthDayNews) -- Researchers report that gene therapy has successfully treated four children with severe combined immunodeficiency disorder, more popularly known as the "bubble boy" disease.

The finding appears in the Dec. 17 issue of The Lancet.

The genetic disorder first came to public awareness in the 1980s when David Vetter, a Texas boy with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), was housed in a bubble to prevent infections before he died.

With SCID, the immune system, especially the white blood cells, don't function properly. Persons with the disorder are at high risk of catching infections.

In the new study, the researchers first removed stem cells, which are immature cells capable of differentiating into many types of cells, from the children's own bone marrow.

"These children are born with a defect in a particular gene," said study co-author Dr. Christof von Kalle, an associate professor of pediatrics and program leader for molecular and gene therapy at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital.

Next, the researchers substituted correct genetic information for the defective information, putting the new genetic material inside a leukemia virus. The leukemia virus served as a gene vector, delivering the gene to the patient's cells, von Kalle explained. "It's also called a gamma retrovirus," he said of the leukemia virus. "These viruses are used because they have the capability of getting into cells without causing disease." Once the genetic material is in the cells, a healthy copy of the gene is made, he said.

After gene therapy, all four children started making the correct T-cells.

"They are back to nearly normal," von Kalle said. "Patients were discharged and living at home."

Von Kalle stops short of calling it a cure. "We don't really know for how long" the gene therapy will be effective, he said. The longest follow-up for gene therapy for SCID, he said, is four years, involving patients in a French trial.

Another gene therapy expert not involved in the study calls the new work both important and exciting. "It confirms the earlier finds that this gene therapy for this devastating disease really works," said Dr. Mark A. Kay, a professor of pediatrics and genetics at Stanford University.

Whether the effects will endure is yet to be determined, he said. "The question is whether this will last permanently or not," he said.

In 2002, a gene therapy study in France was halted after mysterious leukemia-like side effects were found in a 3-year-old boy who underwent the therapy to treat his SCID. While the researchers weren't sure if the gene therapy was to blame for the reaction, they said at the time is might be likely. In animal studies, the risk of such transmission has been reported as very low. The corrective gene used to correct SCID enters the body attached to a virus that theoretically is not supposed to be capable of causing the disease.

More information

To learn more about gene therapy, visit the Human Genome Project (www.ornl.gov ).

The cycle of life should not be changed by humans.
We're already living longer lives than nature intended
and I personally think that if it's your time to go, then
you should go without a fight. People getting blood
transfusions and new organs at an old age make me mad.
It's sad to see how the rich abuse medical technology to
live way past 80 when the life expentency in the Sudan is
under 40 years. Unless these new technologies are for EVERYONE
then they shouldnt be developed at all. That's my 'not so humble' opinion.

I feel your egalitarianism key.
I dunno why these motherfuckers want to stay so bad. You like your bungalow that much? Your porche? wtf. You gotta die sometime. Can't run from that.
But yeah there is an incredible inbalance in the world. Instead of survival of the fittest, we have survival of the fattest.
I mean society is great to draw upon the strengths of everyone and to downplay our individual weaknesses....
But yeah shit's outta control.
People blame overpopulation so much but that's only half the problem. I mean when you have one nation using like half the worlds resources you got a problem.
Anyways...

I'm a do not resuscitate guy. If its my time...its my time. Let me go. This is part of my reasoning to go on ahead and buy a motorcycle. I'm not living in fear. And for the record...I do love my bungalow...and I'll love my porsche when I get it as well.

Originally posted by <KEY3>@Dec 23 2004, 01:37 PMthis is probably an unpopular view.....

The cycle of life should not be changed by humans.
We're already living longer lives than nature intended
and I personally think that if it's your time to go, then
you should go without a fight. People getting blood
transfusions and new organs at an old age make me mad.
It's sad to see how the rich abuse medical technology to
live way past 80 when the life expentency in the Sudan is
under 40 years. Unless these new technologies are for EVERYONE
then they shouldnt be developed at all. That's my 'not so humble' opinion.

[post=3765461]Quoted post[/post]​

Click to expand...

while you may say that, i doubt you actually practice it. i mean, where do you draw the line? is it your belief that people shouldn't take medication for any illness they may come across? with anything from strep throat to cancer, i think it would sort of silly to not utilize medication if it's available. and just because a lot of people can't afford to benefit from such medication doesn't mean it shouldn't be available to those who can.

i can understand your gripe with unnecessary operations at an old age, but to say that life shouldn't be changed by humans is a belief that contradicts way too many aspects of peoples' daily lives to ever be lived up to... unless you live in the forest your entire life.

taking vitamins and medications when needed - no problem
living in an oxygen tent attached to a pace maker - not cool

Certainly if I caught cancer I would do whatever possible to
beat the reaper, but if it's my time to go, then it's my time to go.
If the treatment works, which it often does not, then it's not my
time to go. I totally agree that it's easy to say but hard to do.

Originally posted by <KEY3>@Dec 23 2004, 03:03 PMReally it's all about the D.N.R.

[post=3765573]Quoted post[/post]​

Click to expand...

Dynamic Noise Reduction?

jk... i hear what you're saying. on a tangent: in my opinion, once it becomes necessary for people to take care of you (i.e changing your diapers, bathing you, etc.), there's no point in continuing life. my grandmother is 96 years old, in a nursing home, and wants nothing more than to just die (well, actually, she said things like that years ago, now i think she is delusional and living out the 80's again)... and rightfully so. she contributes nothing to this world except costing taxpayers money for her to take up space. i know it might sound harsh, but it's true... they're being given medicine that only prolongs their vegetable-like state of being. i certainly don't want to live that long... relying on others to take care of me and such... there's no point. that's why i'm going to kill myself when i turn 60, maybe 65, so my family doesn't have to worry about all that nonsense.

it's very easy to make judgements about medical science when your life doesn't depend on it.
unfortunately, so many illnesses are not fatal, but cause suffering upon suffering, and it is not necessarily because of medical science that people in that position are being kept alive. "time to go" is not always a clear line.